


The story is told as such:

by fernlyan_epho



Category: Dune - All Media Types, Dune Series - Frank Herbert
Genre: Gen, but maybe I was just a precocious kid so lets be safe, honestly this could be rated G
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:42:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26178952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fernlyan_epho/pseuds/fernlyan_epho
Summary: Irulan reflects on her marriage to Paul, public appearances, and fulfilment.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27





	The story is told as such:

**Author's Note:**

> I've only read Dune (I have Dune Messiah on hold at the library), so perhaps these speculations will be proven wrong. Hopefully not! I am intrigued at how political marriages can be emotionally beneficial and surprisingly uncomplicated, and I'd like to think kindly of Irulan. 
> 
> Also please forgive me if I've used incorrect terms for something, or otherwise misplaced information. I believe this to be canon-compliant, but I did read Dune rather quickly and rather recently, and I'd be unsurprised if I got some details wrong. Let me know and I'll go back and edit!

The story is told as such:

_The Princess Irulan, the Emperor’s eldest and a jewel in the crown of House Corinno, was the ladder by whom the favored Kwisatz Haderach ascended to galactic power. Though she indeed chose to follow the young Atreides’ path, and at a vital junction in time, her virtue was primarily her birth and circumstance. Any glimmer of agency is essentially a fiction, lost in the grand sweep of history._

_Her role in the Atreides court, then, though vital, was largely symbolic: a ladder, a path, a key, a jewel, a crown. This role was demonstrated most clearly by the continued presence and primacy of Chani Kynes, the Fremen woman by whom Muad'Dib begat his children._

Some more sentimental versions add on, in characteristic passive voice:

_The Princess Irulan was thus sentenced to stand by the man to whom she devoted so much of her literary output, always in reach but never touched._

The story is never told:

_The Princess Irulan, born to a great purpose, found more peace in a ruse of a marriage than she ever thought to expect from her life._

The reason for this, Irulan knows, is many-faceted. She herself is complicit in the perpetuation of her husband's reputation; her role as an author is often to spin myths which inevitably relegate herself to an auxiliary role. The fact of Paul's greatness and of Chani's importance and of her own lack of either of these things certainly added up to a story of a devoted yet neglected wife. 

In fact, Irulan saw no issue with the facts reported as such. She supposed that she was a devoted yet neglected wife. It was the editorializing which was inaccurate, the assumptions that she wanted something from Paul which he was not providing, or even from her political position, or from the universe writ large. 

The Lady Jessica thought her proud, she knew, and perhaps lazy as well. Perhaps it was snobbish and generally iniquitous to be complacent with one's situation. Lady Jessica was probably right that she could have more than she did, be more than she was. She was the wife of the Kwisatz Haderach, after all, and a product of careful Bene Gesserit breeding herself. 

It was her Bene Gesserit breeding which had facilitated these events so prettily, whatever the story said of her agency. Agency, she supposed, was a complicated thing, and though a certain preoccupation with it ran through her writings, she herself didn't pretend to answers. Whether by circumstance or virtue, she had seen so clearly and immediately what her role would be at this court, at the side of a man like Paul Atreides, a step behind Muad'Dib, and three doors down from Usul. 

"But here's a man fit to be your son," she had said. 

"I am already in love with this man," the stories put in her mouth.

The reason the story always implied a dissatisfaction on her part, she reasoned, was that it failed to investigate Irulan herself. Noting that her place in court was relational did not cure them from thinking of her the same way. She was the Emperor's daughter, Muad'Dib's wife, and never simply Princess Royal, let alone Irulan. 

The truth of the matter was that no one telling the story knew the girl who first went a day without crying when she was five or six. They did not know the girl who had (to her mother's great embarrassment) hid behind her father's skirts on her first public appearance. And they certainly did not know the girl who had, delicately and courteously and with well-trained grace, excused herself from her first suitor-meeting to go vomit from some mix of anxiety and despair.

"But here's a man fit to be your son," she had said.

"Anything to make the violence stop," the stories had put in her mouth. 

This version was more accurate. It was, in many respects, how her father had heard her. Surrounded by carnage and facing the destruction of the Imperial economy, Irulan was indeed the key to peace and she was willing to make sacrifices. Marrying Paul Atreides wasn't a bad match, after all, even if Muad'Dib was holding her father at metaphorical lasgunpoint. She had been born and bred and raised to be hardly more than a cheops-piece, and could have been sentenced to far worse. 

But this, too, was a reductive story, and saw her once again as only relational, compelled by imperial politics and historical forces. If she had only meant to stop the violence, she could have said as such, and the result would have been the same. 

"But here's a man fit to be your son," she had said. And she had meant, in some fashion,

"This man will be more brother than husband."

Paul had been looking at Irulan when he made his offer to her father. She could see that he saw her features and figure, but noted them as curiosities, accidental to his interest. This itself was not uncommon. Though poets sang of her green eyes and golden hair, all suitor-meetings were unapologetically about politics. 

But even the “purely” political marriages presented to her--to old men, to queer men, to men with concubines and common-law wives--involved a certain amount of parading. _Yes, here is the Princess Royal, how beautiful and well-mannered. Yes, her father gave her to me. How prettily she waits in bed for me._ She supposed that Paul needn't do such parading, for, to be crude, he bought her with power already acquired, rather than for power she could provide. 

Paul had since told her of how he had foreseen their marriage, fifteen and grieving his father, abandoned in the desert. With his permission, she had weaved this story into one of her works ( _The Humanity of Muad’Dib,_ she believed).

The story is told as such:

_The Kwisatz Haderach, alone with his mother in the wilderness of Arrakis, could see, through prophecy and mental calculation, what would become of him. He saw himself acquiring the desert-power his father sought, becoming Muad’Dib, the one who leads the way. He saw himself holding the keys to the most precious resource of the universe, upturning every hierarchy. He saw himself winning the hand of the Emperor’s daughter, sealing a future which no one else, not even the Bene Gesserit, had foreseen._

The story is told:

_Paul Atreides, through brilliant maneuvering only possible by the Bene Gesserit’s blessed Kwisatz Haderach, and through religious power only available to the Fremen Lisan al-Gaib, avenged his father irreproachably, not merely regaining the planet which had precipitated his betrayal but by routing out those in power who had turned a blind eye to such treachery. In marriage to the Emperor’s daughter, he symbolically overturned every structure which failed its moral test, and secured an unprecedented regime._

The story is never told:

_Paul Atreides, barely a man and carrying the weight and sorrow of the universe, struck a deal with an anxious and put-upon princess._

There was a certain childlike quality to this deal, to this trust. Just as the stories do not speak of Irulan, the girl who hated the eyes of the imperial court, they do not speak of Paul, the boy who yet mourned his father. The day they met in Arrakeen, when Paul made offers to her father, Irulan had seen this young man, who loved his Fremen-bride with unparalleled sincerity, and had known his almost-naïve honor would extend to her, that she could live peacefully ignored, seen but never watched. 

Irulan is pleased with this. As long as the stories spoke of some woman, forgotten and unloved by the most illustrious man in the universe, they did not speak of Irulan, and as long as they spoke of the Kwisatz Haderach, they did not speak of Paul.

On their anniversary, after dinner and dancing, Paul had escorted her back to her rooms. Such an occasion meant Chani’s absence, and Irulan could feel how her husband missed his Siyaha. She invited Paul to share coffee, and with a subtly surprised expression he followed her. They spoke of trivial party gossip, of clothes and dance partners and gifts. They laughed and shared poetry. When it was time to leave for sleep, he embraced her, holding her tightly as if with all the loneliness he carried.

"Thank you," he said.

She smiled, and squeezed his hands once before he took his leave.


End file.
